Annual Review – 2025 highlights

Highlights

Throughout 2025, we seized every opportunity to amplify the youth employment challenge and opportunity. To drive action, we need audiences to better understand what’s happening for young people, and care deeply about it.

Here are some of our key achievements:

We cemented a robust theory of change, through which we generate high-quality evidence and turn it into action by collaborating with policymakers, employers, funders, delivery partners, and others who have the means to enact change for marginalised young people.

Alongside helping our key audiences to recognise the moral case for action, we built growing recognition for the economic case. There is a potential £86 billion long-term economic benefit if England can match the lowest NEET rate in the OECD – that of the Netherlands – by 2050. This would support 567,000 more young people into work.

The Government announced an £820 million funding package for young people’s learning and employment opportunities, and a £725 million package of reforms to the apprenticeship system – both informed by evidence of what works.

We welcomed 120 employers to our inaugural Good Work Summit. The Summit was a key moment in facilitating collaboration between employers, policymakers, and young people – including a roundtable attended by Skills Minister, Baroness Jacqui Smith.

We launched two full randomised controlled trials with employers, with a further four at the feasibility stage.

We shared 42 publications, including our second Youth Employment Outlook and our flagship report on the drivers of trends in young people’s mental health, launched in parliament.

Our Youth Employment Toolkit had over 10,000 users.

We worked with 37 young people. They co-created 6 influencing assets and took on a further 44 opportunities – sharing their experiences in parliament and with the media, shaping research, and influencing grant-making decisions.

Looking ahead

We enter 2026 with youth employment and economic inactivity high on the national agenda, and we progress with momentum into the second year of our strategy, building on our 2025 achievements and learning.

Our maturing pipeline of evidence will see the wheels of our evidence engine turning steadily to fuel meaningful systems change, and we will continue to use our growing profile to drive change at scale, deepening engagement with our key audiences to ensure that robust evidence informs policy, practice and investment decisions.

Planned activity in 2026

Our early intervention programme, Building Futures, will complete its demonstrator phase, providing critical learning to inform future scaling and emulation of approaches for young people at risk of becoming NEET.

Our place-based systems change programme, Connected Futures, will progress into more advanced phases of systems change delivery and learning in select places, while consolidating insights to inform wider adoption of learning.

Our Youth Employment Toolkit will be expanded. The Toolkit is a free online resource, and the updates will support decision-makers to improve the lives of young people with more accessible insights on the impact of common youth employment interventions.

Our groundbreaking wave of trials with employers will begin to generate evidence to support employers across the country to better recruit, retain, and support marginalised young people.

Our major trials across employment support, early intervention, and summer jobs will strengthen the evidence base on what works to improve employment outcomes for marginalised young people.

Young people with experience of marginalisation in the labour market will continue to bring essential value to our work, as we welcome our fourth Future Voices Group, and ensure youth voice is embedded in the design and delivery of systems change.